The message heard loud and clear from the voters (Rep. Dan Burton)

First and foremost, the People want us to cut government spending. We have done it before and we can do it again. In March of 1995, the first Republican majority in the House of Representatives in 40 years, brought forward a rescission bill cutting $17 billion in spending across twelve different cabinet agencies, the Congress, White House and a variety of independent agencies. This new Republican majority must move as quickly to bring a rescission package to the floor. President Obama said that “he would be happy” to sit down with Congressional Republicans and go line by line through the budget to address our country’s enormous fiscal challenges. It’s up to the president to make good on his offer. Going forward, we have to impose hard, binding limits on the government’s ability to spend taxpayer money; things like automatic sunsets on all federal programs, and requiring a two-thirds recorded vote in the House of Representatives and in the Senate to increase the statutory limit on the public debt to force us to stop borrowing money.

Next the People want us to cut their taxes. It is not enough to simply stop the tax hike from taking effect on January 1, 2011; we must go further and cut taxes to get our economy moving again. Ronald Reagan understood this simple concept and cut personal and business taxes in order to jumpstart economic growth – and it worked. It can work again. For example, reducing the lowest individual income tax rates from 15 percent to 10 percent and from 10 percent to 5 percent will result in every taxpaying-family in America getting an immediate increase in their take home pay – an average benefit of $500 in tax relief from the drop in the 10 percent bracket and $1,200 from the drop in the 15 percent bracket. Similarly, the United States currently has the second highest corporate tax rate of any industrialized nation, putting American workers and businesses at a huge competitive disadvantage. Economists estimate that simply lowering the top business tax rate from 35 percent to 22 percent could create 350,000 manufacturing jobs and 2.13 million jobs overall.

Last, but by no means least; the People want us to fundamentally reshape how Congress conducts its business so our time and energy is focused on their priorities. During the 111th Congress the House of Representatives spent hundreds of hours “debating” resolutions on things like the 2,560th anniversary of Confucius, but we only took two hours to consider the government takeover of the health care industry known as Obamacare; that’s simply ridiculous. We must bring real reforms forward that make the People’s house run smarter, cheaper and more transparently.

If we do all of these things and remember to keep listening to the needs of the American people first and foremost, we can avoid the mistakes and ethical problems of the soon to be departed Democrat majority. If not, election night in 2012 could very well end up being a reverse of this year and end up being a long night for Republicans.